Abstract

Rigorous inequalities are derived for the ground‐state energy of a nonrelativistic quantum‐mechanical system of N particles in gravitational interaction. It is shown that gravitational forces do not saturate, the binding energy per particle increasing with N, like N2 for a Bose system, like (N4/3) for a Fermi system. As a by‐product, we obtain a generally valid Heisenberg‐like inequality for N‐fermion systems, expressing very simply the effect of the Pauli exclusion principle. These results are extended to the case of a system of oppositely charged particles which is shown to behave, with respect to gravitational forces, as a Fermi system as soon as particles with one sign of charge only are identical fermions. This explains quantitatively how and when gravitational forces finally predominate over Coulomb forces for large enough bodies (planets). A further extension to the case where relativistic effects enter only at the kinematical level permits us to derive rigorously from first principles the existence and an estimate of the Chandrasekhar mass limit, above which no collection of cold matter is stable (white dwarfstars).